Read Online Gatekeepers by Robert Liparulo - Free Book Online

who’d eased the tension of a trying day on the training fields with a whispered joke—he thought of the body he’d left in the cave. It would have decayed, even the skeleton becoming powder after so many millennia.
    Taksidian squeezed the hilt of his knife. The weapon had made him the assassin he was, the man he had become. And on more than a few occasions, it had saved his life. It was his friend, more surely than Amshi ever had been. His blade had feasted many times since that first taste. Now it was hungry again.
    For the dozenth time, he checked the door. The handle turned, but the door wouldn’t open. He tried to quietly shoulder his way through, but whatever held it was strong. He was about to return to the locker in the school when he heard noises beyond the door, in the hallway.
    He leaned his ear against the door. Soft footsteps. Quiet voices. Something was going on out there, in the house. He shifted his feet into a more comfortable stance and leaned back against the shelves. He would bide his time in the closet a little longer.
    He would await the opportunity for his blade to feast again . . .

CHAPTER
    sixteen
    W EDNESDAY, 1.16 A.M.
    David led Toria into the hallway by the hand. She was half-asleep, mumbling something about going on a ride. Her free hand clutched her “nigh-night,” a threadbare baby blanket she always slept with. She stumbled and stopped, seeming ready to doze standing up.
    â€œCome on, Toria,” David said.
    Xander was on all fours in the hallway, peering around the corner to the foyer below.
    David realized the lights were no longer shining through the windows. “Did they leave?” he whispered. He knelt beside his brother and leaned to see the front doors and the windows beside them.
    â€œI don’t know. A car left, but I just heard voices out front.”
    â€œWhere are the policemen?” Toria said. She had plopped down behind the boys and now blinked heavy lids at them.
    â€œI think they were the ones who left,” Xander said. “There were red and blue lights flashing through the windows, and now they’re gone.”
    â€œWhy would they leave?” David said. “And if it’s not the cops out there, who is it?”
    Xander looked at him with raised eyebrows. “Who do you think?”
    â€œTaksidian?” David’s chest grew tight. It seemed that no matter how many times something frightened him, he never got used to it.
    Footsteps clomped heavily on the porch steps.
    Xander backhanded David in the arm. “Come on,” he said. “Let’s get to the other side of the stairs before they get to the windows.”
    David reached back for Toria, but she was already rising. They darted past the staircase and the railing that overlooked the foyer. Where the wall started again, opposite Toria’s bed-room, they dropped to the floor. Xander looked around the corner and through the railing to the front door.
    Toria nudged David. She said, “Why did Xander want us on this side of the stairs? Aren’t there more hiding places on the other side? We could go up to the third floor.”
    â€œXander,” David said. “Toria doesn’t know about the closet.”
    With all their discussion of the closet-to-locker portal, let alone their use of it, it was difficult to believe it had remained a secret.
    Xander smiled at her. “If we have to run, you’re in for a big surprise.”
    â€œI don’t like surprises,” she said.
    Xander shook his head. “Then you live in the wrong house.” He turned his attention back to the front door.
    Something banged down on the porch. There was a squeak, somehow different from the weather vane, which had been reaching David’s ears every now and then since he’d awakened.
    He rose on his knees to see the front door over his brother’s head. A shadow moved over the tall, narrow windows. Both he and Xander pulled back.
    â€œI